2013.06.18

Tomorrow, at the ICA Conference in London, I'll be presenting data from one of my forthcoming journal articles with my friend Mark Latonero. It's got tons of data from two surveys of over 5,000 people around the globe, tracking the changes in their awareness, engagement with, and opinions regarding "configurable culture" between 2006 and 2010.

2013.04.22

This weekend, I was fortunate to host a keynote discussion between media theorist (and Moog afficionado) Trevor Pinch and DJ/author Paul D. Miller, a/k/a DJ Spooky. It was part of an excellent conference called "Extending Play" organized by the doctoral students at Rutgers SC&I.

Our panel was a lot of fun -- a freewheeling discussion that ranged from music and tech geekery to broad social theory. You can listen to the audio transcript here:

2013.04.09

Yesterday, I contributed to an interesting story on Marketplace Radio regarding Margaret Thatcher's musical legacy. There's a lot to say on this subject, but my basic point was that Thatcherism catalyzed the punk movement, which was still largely regional, at exactly the moment that media deregulation in the US and elsewhere made British culture a hot export. In essence, Thatcherism ended up promoting its own critique abroad.

The text version of the story has more of my input than the audio version.

2013.01.21

Last month, I got a chance to give a talk based on my forthcoming book The Piracy Crusade at NYU, as part of the Computer Science department's Computers and Society lecture series. I always love talking to those folks, in large part because the guy who puts it together, Professor Evan Korth, is one of the coolest people I know. At a certain point, I just abandoned the presentation altogether and got into the nitty gritty. Fun ensued.

2012.11.29

Two weeks ago, I sat on a panel at INET New York about the "six strikes" Copyright Alert System, the bargain struck between Hollywood and America's major broadband ISPs to identify people suspected of illegally infringing copyrighted content and slowly cut off their bandwidth.

The event was very informative. For the first hour, corporate stakeholders (e.g. RIAA, MPAA, Verizon, Comcast) discussed the specifics of their plan. For the second hour, a bunch of us critics and consumer advocates (e.g. Gigi Sohn, Jeff Jarvis) responded to the plan, raising several questions and concerns.

Then there was a final mega-panel in which both groups got to address each other directly. I don't think any of us had our minds changed 180 degrees, but I'm pretty sure we all gained some deeper insight into what's at stake here.
The full video of the event is below. Surprisingly riveting for a wonkfest.

p.s. As of today, the CAS launch has been postponed till next year (ostensibly due to Hurricane Sandy)

2012.11.20

A few weeks ago, I spoke at an event with P2P defense attorney Ray Beckerman on behalf of Ben Kallos' bid for a NYC Council seat. Here's the full video of the event, which covers a fair amount of copyright, law & policy stuff:

2012.11.17

There's a lot of talk going on these days about the business model for streaming music, specifically about what fair royalty rates might look like, and how to move the business model forward while compensating everyone fairly. I plan to address this in a longer blog post soon, but in the meantime you might be interested in hearing my quick take, recorded during a KCBS radio interview yesterday.